I’ve spent almost a week with Safari 4 now and I thought I’d share my experiences:
History
I wrote about this already, but the combination of having a history search box on the Top Sites page, plus the inclusion of Cover Flow is fantastic.
Some said that Coverflow is eye candy, but I’ve experienced just the opposite. Many times this week I’ve thought about a post I saw earlier on some forum, searched for it in the history and then visually flipped to find the page. I’m a visual person and it works very, very effectively. I can recall what a page looked like much faster than what the title might have been.
Speed
Safari 4 is fast. Really fast. In fact, the only slowdowns I’ve noticed is when it is loading ads. There are some ad-blockers out there, but I’ve been running without them just to get the average user’s experience.
Things are very, very snappy.
Tabs on Top
I really don’t like this, so much so that I reverted to the older style.
The new UI might work for a small amount of tabs, but until they make changes, I’ll use the old format. I have even tried to stop using tabs altogether, just to see how I like that. I do not have any conclusions on that as of yet.
What I found scary is that some have suggested Apple may use this new user interface for all applications in Snow Leopard. It might be a way to ‘dock’ all documents of a certain application together into one window.
Ick.
However, if they spruce up the UI so it is less noisy, if they make it so the “land mine” controls, like the handles and close buttons don’t function in inactive tabs, then maybe it’ll be more useful. For now, all it does is reduce one useful title into a bunch of little useless titles.
Address Box List
The new address box matching list is fantastic. The popup list that shows when you start typing a URI now shows the “top hit” which is often just the root of the URI, for example, http://www.apple.com, vs. http://www.apple.com/discussions?p=1i191282928292982921822u22282.
Then you get a list of bookmark matches and history matches, both separated from each other visually. Nice!
Overall, it feels much less messy than before.
Top Sites
The new Top Sites page is interesting. I’m not really using the top sites themselves per se because I am an avid user of RSS via NetNewsWire. However, for non-RSS users, I can see this as a big boon. The updated page icon in the upper-right really stands out and lets you know some new content exists.
As I wrote earlier, the main reason I’ve left Top Sites as my default page is for the Search History box. Super, super nice.
Stability
Safari 4 has not crashed once. It’s been open nearly 24/7 and only gets quit when I log out.
RAM usage seems down too, but still a bit high, likely due to in-memory caches. However, memory does go down when you close a tab/window, so that is a step in the right direction.
Summary
Safari 4 is a keeper. I am very impressed, have had zero issues with it and it has improved my browsing experience.
Nice job, WebKit team!
I’ve noticed that my RAM usage in Safari 4 is significantly higher, actually, and especially for apps that use WebKit (like DashboardClient). Overall I’m less happy — the new tabs are clearly a copy (homage?) to Chrome, but the overloading of title bar / tab is really, really bad for usability. It’s confusing to look at a title bar full of tabs and have to think “I want to move this window, what do I click? Can’t click the wrong part of the title bar because I might close or move a tab”. Chrome does this better by having some space for a title bar above the tabs, and preserving the whole “the address bar is part of the tab” bit. But, while I prefer the old-style tabs, I’m forcing myself to use the new style to convince myself maybe there’s something good about it. I’m also fairly convinced Apple will change it by the time Safari 4 ships because of the usability issues.